Mathematical ability and musical ability may not seem on the surface to be connected, but people who have researched the subject

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问题     Mathematical ability and musical ability may not seem on the surface to be connected, but people who have researched the subject--and studied the brain--say that they are. Three quarters of the bright but speech-delayed children in the group I studied had a close relative who played a musical instrument. The children themselves usually took readily to math and other analytical subject and to music.
    Black, white and Asian children in this group show the same patterns. However, it is clear that blacks have been greatly overrepresented in the development of American popular music and greatly underrepresented in such fields as mathematics, science and engineering.
    If the abilities required in analytical fields and in music are so closely related, how can there be this great discrepancy? One reason is that the development of mathematical and other such abilities requires years of formal training, as has happened with a number of well-known black musicians.
    It is precisely in those kinds of music where one can acquire great skill without formal training that blacks have excelled, popular music rather than classical music, piano rather than violin, blues rather than opera. This is readily understandable, given that most blacks, for most of American history, have not had either the money or the leisure for long years of formal study in music.
    Blacks have not merely held their own in American popular music. They have played a disproportionately large role in the development of jazz, both traditional and modern. A long string of names comes to mind-- Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker... and so on.
    None of this presupposes any special innate ability of blacks in music. On the contrary, it is perfectly consisted with blacks having no more such inborn ability than anyone else, but being limited to being able to express such ability in narrower channels than others who have had the money, the time and the formal education to spread out over a wider range of music, as well as into mathematics, science and engineering.
The word "discrepancy" (Para. 3) most probably means ______.

选项 A、difference
B、excellence
C、inborn ability
D、inability

答案A

解析 语义理解题 考查第二、三段之间的逻辑指代关系。第一段先确定音乐和数学的关系密切,第二段指出黑人在音乐方面表现卓越而在工程、数学等方面却默默无闻,第三段就此提出疑问:how can there be this great discrepancy?,由此可推断discrepancy指“差异,距离”,故选A项。
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